TOLiD: Bridging the Architecture Gap in Vision Foundation Model to LiDAR Pretraining via Token Lifting for Distillation
arXiv:2607.10762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-modal distillation from Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to LiDAR backbones has recently emerged as a self-supervised pretraining strategy that reduces reliance on dense point-wise annotation for 3D scene understanding. However, existing distillation pipelines typically treat the VFM as a frozen feature source and train a heterogeneous 3D backbone to match fixed image embeddings, forcing the student to bridge both the modality gap and the cros